Cheetah is back but hungry: Why were African big cats not fed during transit to India?

Morena (Madhya Pradesh): Over seven decades after the cheetah was hunted to extinction in India, the majestic beasts - albeit the African variety - have made a much publicised return to the jungles of the Sub-continent. Eight African cheetahs from Namibia were released into the wilds of the Kuno-Palpur National Park in Madhya Pradesh on September 17 as part of the celebrations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 72nd birthday. The felines were brought from Africa in a cargo aircraft as part of an inter-continental translocation project and flown to the Kuno-Palpur National Park (KPNP) in Sheopur district. However, the cheetah’s were kept hungry throughout their travel from the arid grasslands of Namibia to the forbidding ravines of Madhya Pradesh’s Chambal region. After taking off from Namibia, the felines reached Gwalior via Jaipur, from where they they were taken to the Kuno-Palpur National Park and finally given food. As a precaution, it is mandated that an animal should have an empty stomach at the time of commencing a long journey, MP Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) JS Chauhan told news agency PTI. Officials of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change were looking after arrangements related to the inter-continental cheetah translocation project and were in touch with Namibian authorities, he said. The MP’s forest officer said on arrival the cheetahs will be first kept in small enclosures for a month and then in bigger ones for a couple of months for acclimatization and familiarisation with their surroundings. Later, they will be released in the wild, he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi released three of these cheetahs into the park’s quarantine enclosures on September 17, his birthday, as part of the cheetah reintroduction programme, more than seven decades after the species became extinct in India. “We have set up six small quarantine enclosures as per the legal mandate required during the shifting of animals from one continent to another,” an official had said earlier. He had said according to the protocol, the animals need to be quarantined for a month each before and after shifting from one continent to another. The last Indian cheetah had died in Koriya district in what is now Chhattisgarh in 1948 and the species was declared extinct in India in 1952. The ‘African Cheetah Introduction Project in India’ was conceived in 2009. A plan to introduce the big cat in the KPNP by November last year had suffered a setback due to the Covid-19 pandemic, officials said. Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.